Apple Store Will Now Match Competitors' Prices — Apple has apparently fired the first shot in the holiday shopping battle, by announcing internally that retail store employees have the authority to match the prices of other authorized retailers. The stores have also cancelled …

Amazon Kindle 2 Slated For “Early Q1″ — Update on the Kindle 2: It was scheduled to be released in October in time for this holiday season, but Bezos himself reportedly pulled the plug for last minute changes to the software. Our sources now say it's tentatively scheduled to go on sale in “early next quarter.”

Cisco To Shut Down For 4 Days At Year End — If you want to know how bad it is going to get for all of us in Silicon Valley, just look at Cisco Systems. For first time in its history the company is going to shut down for four days at the end of the year, according to a report by UBS Research.

Piper Jaffray addresses 12 more ‘unanswered Apple questions’ — Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster on Tuesday issued one of his trademark reports to address a number ‘unanswered questions surrounding the Apple story,’ such as when the company plans to next update its iPhone and the prospects for an Apple netbook.

Will Apple launch a netbook? And other burning questions — Apple has said “it doesn't do cheap,” but one analyst reckons that Steve Jobs & Co. will address the netbook market at some point-either with an 11-inch MacBook Air priced between $800 and $1,000 in 2009 or a tablet Mac in 2010.

Microsoft Examines Causes of ‘Cyberchondria’ — If that headache plaguing you this morning led you first to a Web search and then to the conclusion that you must have a brain tumor, you may instead be suffering from cyberchondria. — On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results …

Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode — The keynote speaker at this past summer's TechReady conference—a gathering of 6,000 or so Microsoft engineers from around the world—was the company's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. This was not a routine appearance.

eBay Traffic Plummeting (EBAY) — eBay's (EBAY) core business continues to fall apart. Some of the decline is likely the result of the declining economy. The rest of it is likely the result of the trends that have been clobbering eBay for the past two years: competition, overpricing …

Making Twitter Smarter — Soren and Howard have been busy building out stocktwits and today they sent me a link to a firefox extension that makes twitter a bit smarter. When you add the stocktwits extension to firefox, a stock tweet will look like this: — Those tickers are now hotlinked to stocktwits.

E-Commerce Shrinks for First Time, Research Firm Says — Just as many Web retailers feared, online shoppers are being unusually frugal this holiday season. — During the first 23 days of November, according to a report to be released later on Tuesday by the research firm comScore …

Magnify.net Raises $750K For Web Video Service — NYC-based Web video startup Magnify.net has raised about $750,000 in Series A1 financing. This is in addition to the $1 million it raised in February. Innovation Ventures led the round, and all major investors returned, including RoseTech Ventures …

Economy Deals Online Ad Spending a Hit — Digital still stronger than traditional — There seems to be more bad news about the economy every day, and falling ad spending numbers are part of the mix. Although online advertising is still on a positive growth curve, that growth is slowing …

Microsoft, Not Google, Has the Real Search Wiki — The New York Times this weekend put the spotlight on a research project Microsoft is working on for next-generation search that is more like a search-oriented wiki than Google's own SearchWiki. — No, this isn't Kumo.

iPhone developer stoops to straight bribery — Best application ever, five stars, taverymuch — One iPhone developer has found a novel way to increase rankings in the iTunes store: pay people $5 a time to post positive reviews, thus ensuring the general public gets an unbiased view of application quality.

Opera Mini 4.2 Ready to Roll with New Servers and Skins — The round of beta and bug-testing for the latest Opera Mini mobile browser has wrapped up, and now the official release of version 4.2 is available for download. There are lots of improvements to this version, including skins …

TiVo Mobile brings remote queuing to iPhone — TiVo and web firm Mobui today rolled out TiVo Mobile. The web app gives the iPhone, iPod touch and other mobile devices with full web browsers the ability to remotely schedule one of TiVo's Series 2 or 3 DVRs and to find shows using …

KickApps Actually Raises $14 Million In Series C Round — Yesterday, word leaked out that white-label social networking startup KickApps raised another round of funding. But the amount reported by PEHub ("over $13 million"), based on an old Reg. D filing at the SEC, wasn't exactly precise.

Beatles iTunes deal is ‘stalled’ — Sir Paul McCartney has said he wants The Beatles' catalogue to appear on Apple's iTunes store, but that negotiations have currently “stalled”. — “We'd like to do it,” Sir Paul told BBC News. “We are very for it, we've been pushing it.

HP unit sheds stepchild status to take on Cisco — When Mark Hurd took over as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard in 2005 and started looking at the company's businesses, he found a neglected little unit called ProCurve that made networking gear used to connect computing systems on corporate campuses.

Telco Startup Raises $100M for Northeast Buildout — Pocket Communications Northeast, a subsidiary of San Antonio-based cellular operator Pocket Communications, has raised a first round of $100 million to build out a five-city CDMA network in the Northeast that will join an existing network and customer base in South Texas.